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message 301:
by
Marc
(new)
Jun 18, 2015 07:31AM
don't know about immaculacy, that's the religious brigade on the other side isn't it?
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Michael Cargill wrote: "What Tim Hunt said and what Tim Hunt did afterwards are two very different things.Did you not find his comments unacceptable?"
I don't expect, or hope, that anyone would care in the slightest as to whether I find something someone says acceptable or not. Personally, I would rather judge someone on what they have done over a lifetime of dedicated work than on a few silly remarks. It seems to me that the important issue here is that we have lost the services of a man who has made, and would have continued to make, a valuable contribution to the field of cancer research.
We have lost him because of a shitstorm on TwitFace that exploded so quickly that institutions panicked when asked to respond. They lacked the guts to say, 'Let's wait until we can make a balanced assessment.' UCL pulled the plug on Hunt without even talking to him first. Mob rule on the internet triumphed.
I find that unacceptable.
BJ, the question I asked was a perfectly reasonable and uncontroversial one, yet you're refusing to answer it.From what I have seen no-one has judged Tim Hunt outright on these comments alone, merely criticised him for what he has said.
You can praise the man for his life's work and wish that he remained at his post, whilst also condemning him for his ignorant comments.
I'm afraid we will never come together on this issue. Your question is not, to me, 'reasonable and uncontroversial'. David explained very fully, and with perfect clarity, why this is the case and I agree with every word he wrote.
Often struck me as high praise "He provoked a twitter storm" Sorry but why should anybody care what largely anonymous people on twitter think anyway?
A man that you have no affiliation to has said something, and I am asking you whether what that man has said is acceptable.In what way is my question either unreasonable or controversial?
3 minutes 30 to 5 minutes 40 could be quite relevant here...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHMoD...
Perhaps you'd care to re-read David's posts? I'll make some final comments on this topic - there's no point in continuing beyond that as the gap between our understanding of the real issues is unbridgable.
It's not long ago that members of this forum were signing up to the 'Je suis Charlie' movement. In that case cartoonists/publishers deliberately produced and published cartoons that they knew would be offensive to followers of one of the world's great religions. The consequences were appalling. Even though they may not have agreed with what the cartoonists had done, through the 'Je suis Charlie' movement people around the world demonstrated how strongly they felt about the right to freedom of speech and the associated right to offend.
This case is, of course, very different. I don't believe that Hunt deliberately set out to offend, but even if he had I would support his right to say it and I am capable of seeing the significance of those comments when set against the value of his work to society.
As far as I am concerned Hunt, or you Michael, or anyone else, can say whatever they like and I will not choose to be offended by it.
Those who did choose to be offended by his silly comments, aided and abetted by weak institutions, have lost us the valuable services of an eminent scientist.
B J wrote: "Michael Cargill wrote: "What Tim Hunt said and what Tim Hunt did afterwards are two very different things.Did you not find his comments unacceptable?"
I don't expect, or hope, that anyone would ..."
Mob rule did not triumph. it's all down to the University
I've read David's posts and I've read your posts; about the only thing I can see is a steadfast refusal to hold Tim Hunt responsible for the words that came out of Tim Hunt's mouth.
No, what you see is a steadfast refusal to be 'offended' by those words. Hunt has accepted responsibility. None of us is required to hold him responsible.
I am not personally offended by Hunt's words, but that doesn't mean that they weren't offensive.I'm not really sure what you're getting at here.
I hope I'm not interrupting here or speaking out of turn, but my view is that when you are offended you have firstly the right to be angry and secondly the opportunity to either forgive or to continue to be angry. The first may be instinctive - the feeling angry part - the second people have the power to choose.
B J wrote: "Those who did choose to be offended by his silly comments, aided and abetted by weak institutions, have lost us the valuable services of an eminent scientist. "And if his crass comments were allowed to stand unchallenged, how many equally eminent women scientists might be dissuaded from taking up science?
That's the point.
The subtext to what he said was that "women (actually he said "girls") don't belong in the lab because ... "
And the subtext to that is "women aren't as good as men ..."
And the subtext to that is "I can say this because I am in a position of power."
It's a real shame to lose such an eminent scientist. I think that forcing him to resign was the wrong move. He should have been given time to apologise and soldier on.
The reason that he was forced to resign is that we have fought long and hard to eradicate such lazy sexism from people who ought to be role models. We might have lost one 72 year old scientist, but in return we have made a point that hopefully will inspire many more people - either to tell any luddites still out there that this sort of language is unacceptable or to reassure women scientist that they will be treated as equals and not stereotyped as only being good for falling in love with.
On a long term basis I think we should consider that the country would lose inestimably more as numbers of bright young women would be put off entering sciences if they believed that their superiors thought of them in the way Hunt expressed: his departure was certainly the right thing in my eyes.
And on Greece, am I alone in finding that Lagrange woman's stance abhorrent? She personally has a tax free salary of over $550K pa which she has publicly said she could not afford to reduce, but appears to firmly believe that pensioners (who are not, as some of the media like to suggest, much different in age to our own pensioners) on less than 1000 euros a month ...should take a cut in income.
Will wrote: "And on Greece, am I alone in finding that Lagrange woman's stance abhorrent? She personally has a tax free salary of over $550K pa which she has publicly said she could not afford to reduce, but ap..."No you're not alone in this Will
Will wrote: "On a long term basis I think we should consider that the country would lose inestimably more as numbers of bright young women would be put off entering sciences if they believed that their superior..."But how many people are no longer saying things that need saying because they don't want to be howled down by the mob
Yes, call him a daft old fool.
But using the mob to destroy people demeans our society and makes it a far less open and comfortable place for us all to live in.
The danger to our free speech doesn't come from elderly men missing the point, it comes from those who will orchestrate the mob to destroy others if it helps advance their agenda
How has he been destroyed? He's been pushed into retirement (at 72) to make way for the next generation of scientists... he's not lost his house, his family, his fortune or his scientific reputation, has he?And I'm entirely convinced that saying 'girls shouldn't be working in laboratories' is something that did NOT need saying.
The mob didn't force his resignation. His university very quickly decided that what he had said was incompatible with its policies for equal treatment of men and women. It is in their gift to both grant and withdraw honorary professorships. That is what they have done.Rather than let the damage continue they acted quickly to contain it. He was most certainly not saying something that needed saying. In fact, the opposite happened here. The University said something that needed to be said by encouraging him to resign.
The problem here is that there are several freedoms and rights which contradict each other. On the one hand, there is the freedom of speech, but there is also a right not to be discriminated against.
It's interesting isn't it? We are happy when a group of people come together to say something that we agree with - as in the "je suis Charlie" episode.
But when another group of people come together to say something we don't agree with, we call it mob rule.
Ah, so the great and the good of the university, ignoring entirely the howling of the mob on twitter, sat and debated the matter in open forum before dispensing their judgement.No, actually, according to his wife they contacted her and told her if he didn't resign, they'd sack him.
Me, in that position I'd have told them I'd see them in the Industrial tribunal
And yes, we call it mob rule, and its normally a sign of personal integrity that you call it mob rule even if you happen to agree with the mob's underlying premis.
It's the democratic right to free speech when you agree with it. It's mob rule when you don't. Is that it? We pick and choose our labels to suit our point of view?Personal integrity means being consistent.
An honorary position is given to an individual because they are seen as a role model. The organisation wants to be associated with them. They embody the principles and values of the organisation.
What Sir Tim Hunt said was incompatible with UCL's policies. He is not a good role model. They have every right to ask him to resign.
Shall we go wave our pens in the air about this one?
Question Time last night: An employment lawyer in the audience said she would advise a client to dismiss immediately anyone who made such remarks in public.Edit: As I understand it, he hasn't been sacked anyway: just had his contract closed - which presumably means he was self employed, and therefore couldn't use a Tribunal anyway...
His role was as an honorary professor. This is from UCL's website:"Honorary associations of this type are not employment relationships and UCL reserves the right to withdraw honorary status from an individual at any time."
Will wrote: "Question Time last night: An employment lawyer in the audience said she would advise a client to dismiss immediately anyone who made such remarks in public.Edit: As I understand it, he hasn't been sacked anyway: just had his contract closed - which presumably means he was self employed, and therefore couldn't use a Tribunal anyway... ..."
I wasn't sure what his status was with them. If he'd had tenure then he'd have been in a really strong condition.
But yes, I believe in the democratic right to the freedom of speech, but I'm old enough to be able to tell in practice where that finishes and mob rule starts. I saw trolls drive people of newsgroups in the 1990s, hordes of screaming sock puppets demanding their destruction. I've had it myself, people trying to get my employer to sack me (which was a good trick because I've never had one), contacting local papers to try and get them to run stories about me (another good trick, as the journalists knew me) because I dared to say things they disagreed with.
(And even worse knew what I was talking about and produced hard evidence to back up what I was saying.)
Jim, they aren't really examples of mob rule, especially the ones where a few individuals used underhand tactics against you.
Just an observation:It seems odd.
I've heard the bloke criticised in various places for calling women scientists 'girls' and yet I've heard women of all ages from teenagers to OAPs going out for a game of bingo, call themselves girls. Just as I've heard grown men refer to themselves and their mates as 'the boys' or 'the lads'.
Only a couple of days ago a woman - in her mid-forties, I think (being a gentleman of course means I would never ask), say that she 'and the girls' had been for a weekend away together, referring to her mates which are presumably of a similar age.
I assume too that Thin Lizzy's 'The Boys are Back in Town' similarly didn't refer to a school trip.
The problem is that with arbitrarily imposing speech codes from above - as is the current fashion - is that not only do they often come into conflict with normal day to day usage, they do not allow people to lean what is polite or acceptable through naturally evolving usage, mores and politeness as back in the days when these things grew naturally from the bottom up as is demonstrated so well here:
https://jandbvwebster.wordpress.com/2...
Jim - you have an opinion about where democracy finishes and mob rule starts. Others may not share that opinion, as it is one of the hardest things to define.And it is all too tempting to label someone as a troll simply because they don't share your point of view. In this particular story we have had people on both sides of the argument trying to use their fame or weight of popular opinion to get the outcome they want.
UCL had to decide what was best for them. They could have withdrawn his honorary professorship without any warning. They gave him the chance to do the decent thing and resign. And he botched that by saying that he had been forced to resign and then repeating his toxic views. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
He put UCL in a position where they really had no choice. That's not mob rule. That's his mistake. He is now making it worse by digging a deeper hole and trying to portray himself as the victim.
Words and labels mean very different things in different situations.I can call my wife or girlfriend a sex kitten and she'll take it as a compliment, yet if I said that same thing to my female boss or my mother it would be interpreted very differently.
Is that because of arbitrarily imposed speech codes from above, or is it just the nature of language?
Michael Cargill wrote: "Words and labels mean very different things in different situations.I can call my wife or girlfriend a sex kitten and she'll take it as a compliment, yet if I said that same thing to my female bo..."
Both.
Which is exactly the point, is it not?
It also depends on the context and intention.
A male worker at the firm's Christmas party could call his female boss a sex kitten and get promoted, even though it is more likely he could get the sack.
Although, a wise boss would take account of the context and respond accordingly.
He misread the social situation he was in, cocked it up and then apologised. That would have been the end of it in less hysterical times.
Part of this is about word definitions, but I think there is also a question about how the decisions were made.This is what I think has happened here:
Sir Tim Hunt said what he said. There were many witnesses, so I don't think that is open for debate.
His relationship with UCL is as an unpaid honorary professor. The terms of this arrangement are quite clear. It carries no employment rights and can be withdrawn at any moment.
UCL took the decision that what he said was incompatible with his honorary professorship. That's their decision to take. Frankly, it is not surprising. A university cannot allow one of its ambassadors to say that girls in the lab are only good for falling in love with.
UCL gave him the option of resigning immediately or going through the process of removing his honorary professorship. If he had wanted to fight it, this was the moment to do that. They were giving him a chance to withdraw with some dignity.
He decided to resign and then whine about it, presenting himself as the victim.
He could have handled this much better with a clean unreserved apology and a no-strings-attached resignation. Then he would probably have had a short time in the wilderness before everyone would have forgotten about it and we could forgive him.
By not getting it he is making it much harder to recover, both for himself, UCL and science in general.
The speed of his resignation is what has taken people by surprise. It is more normal for an organisation to carry out an inquiry into something like that which also gives a chance for the media storm to die down. We don't know if this was what he was offered but he chose to make the immediate resignation instead.
For a bright bloke he is being remarkably dumb, both in what he said and how he has handled it subsequently.
It is interesting to see that the word girls is in danger of being placed in the same category as the 'N' word, one only able to be used by people it refers to.Some people are artificially promoting the feeling that they are being insulted, or worse, repressed by a word.
So, what was most insulting about Tim Hunt's speech? Was it the fact that he used the 'G' word? Was it that he was sadly out of touch with social mores? Or was it that he badly misjudged his audience?
Having been privileged to have met and worked alongside people of Professor Hunt's intellect over the years (Without any of it rubbing off on me, I might add!) many of them have no social antennae whatever and struggle with what they consider to be mundane.
An addendum to the previous observation.A while back some supermarket or other issued a speech code (from above) saying it was ordering its staff to stop calling customers 'luv', 'darling' or other such endearments because a few customers had complained.
However, I and everyone I talked to about it all said we would much prefer to be called 'darling' 'luv', 'mate' or whatever than 'Sir', 'Madam' or anything formal like that.
As far as I remember the 'initiative' was soon quietly dropped, presumably when they discovered those doing the complaining were far from representative of their customer base.
As usual, we need to start with the evidence and not hearsay. This is what he said in full:“Let me tell you about my trouble with girls. Three things happen when they are in the lab: you fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them they cry.”
It isn't just the reference to the word "girls". It is wrong on so many levels. It is lazy stereotyping and demeaning.
Apart from Boris Johnson and Sir Tim himself, no-one is trying to defend those words.
As a 'girl' and bearing in mind it was a jocular comment I honestly can't see what all the fuss is about. But there again I am also of a similar era and have a tolerant streak.
Times are no more hysterical now than they used to be.The defence that Tim misread the social situation is flawed because during his apology statement he said that he stands by his comments.
I don't think what he said required him to stand down/get the boot, but there is very little reason to actually defend what he said.
message 338:
by
Geoff (G. Robbins) (merda constat variat altitudo)
(last edited Jun 19, 2015 02:59AM)
(new)
Will wrote: "It isn't just the reference to the word "girls". It is wrong on so many levels. It is lazy stereotyping and demeaning."I would suggest that if everyone was examined under that microscope, most of us would also be unemployed.
Perhaps we should follow the Biblical maxim "Let him who is without sin, cast the first stone." On that basis most of the jabbering classes would be struck dumb.
The words storm and teacup come to mind.
Well I was discussing this with my 17 yo daughter and her answer was well it's true. I'm thinking her peer group is like that. But that's the opinion of a 17 yo. I think Sir Tim Hunt should have known better to make such remarks, it's difficult enough for girls to do science anyway. Both my elder daughters are doing sciences at uni and are definitely outnumbered by the boys.
I'm not defending it Michael, I just can't see what all the fuss is about.
Bookworm wrote: " Both my elder daughters are doing sciences at uni and are definitely outnumbered by the boys."Well, indeed.
Both my daughters are science graduates and have responded to this hoo-ha with little more than a shrug. But then both of them have seemingly inherited my distrust of authoritarians, no matter if they pretend to be on the side of the oppressed.
And as the person who most encouraged them to do science rather than a 'soft' girly subject, I would be the first at the barricades along with the outraged - holding my nose, if necessary -if I thought this situation in anyway merited the response it garnered.
So it goes.
Both my daughters are science graduates and have responded to this hoo-ha with little more than a shrug. But then both of them have seemingly inherited my distrust of authoritarians, ......Mind you they are all like that.
And as the person who most encouraged them to do science rather than a 'soft' girly subject, I would be the first at the barricade ...
We have never influenced our daughters's choices.
Bookworm wrote: "We have never influenced our daughters's choices."You probably have done, as we all do. But often not in the way we - or they - expect.
I used the term troll in what might be the old fashioned 'technical' sense. An anonymous individual working behind more than one sock puppet. On one newsgroup you could work out one troll's sockpuppets because he kept forgetting to switch identities :-)As for the use of the word 'luv', in my local culture it is a common term, used by men and women alike. Women also use phrases like 'petal'and 'flower' when talking to the male of the species :-)
But if anybody dare say anything I'll be incredibly offended as such a fascist denial of the rights of an ethnic minority by members of a privileged elite
Jim wrote: "But if anybody dare say anything I'll be incredibly offended as such a fascist denial of the rights of an ethnic minority by members of a privileged elite"It does seem that it would be possible to hoist the PC SJW et al with their own petard by accusing them of Cultural Imperialism when they try to impose their speech codes, edicts, mores and manners and the rest of their ideological baggage on the rest of the population without their consent.
I've always liked the Scottish 'hen'.
I remember a long time ago in Usenet - alt.usuage.english, I think it was - an American woman claiming that the word 'wench' was demeaning and sexist. She just couldn't seem to understand that here in the Black Country, wench is just another common word for woman or girl.
Makes me wonder what the response would have been if Tim Hunt was from the Black Country and proud of its language and historical traditions.
By the by, I've been around the internet long enough to know the proper meaning of the word 'troll' too.
I'd like to be an Internet Orc.Or unicorn.
Oh yes, definitely an Internet unicorn.
Patti (baconater) wrote: "I'd like to be an Internet Orc.Or unicorn.
Oh yes, definitely an Internet unicorn."
http://humerusonline.com/humerusblog/...
I remember the days when trolls were something that Beowulf killed...These days, anybody with a twitter account thinks they're dirty Harry.
David wrote: "Patti (baconater) wrote: "I'd like to be an Internet Orc.Or unicorn.
Oh yes, definitely an Internet unicorn."
http://humerusonline.com/humerusblog/..."
Yep!
It's like the term Hacker, that nowadays seems to have negative connotations, yet back in the day it was anyone who changed something by technical means.
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